This is Klaus Schilling's summary in English of Arthur
Drews' article "Die Leugnung der Geschichtlichkeit Jesu in Vergangenheit
und Gegenwart", on the history of the denial of the historicity of Jesus,
at http://www.radikalkritik.de/leugnung.htm
at Radikal Kritik.Edited, formatted, and uploaded with
Schilling's permission by Michael Hoffman.

Theologians of earlier 20th century were thoroughly upset
when various authors came up with ahistoricity claims back then.Such claims were seen as an attack on
Christianity.Drews is showing that
Jesus Myth theories are not out of pure lust for dissension, but are the
necessary consequence of Gospel post-Enlightenment research and are thoroughly
based on it.

The Christian doctrine states that God sent his only son
from heaven to earth in order to suffer as man and sacrifice himself for the sake
of the human race.Sins are thusly to
be ammortized and eternal life is granted by the resurrection.

This involves both a redeemer legend and the statement about
a particular person, having lived in Palestine around 2000 years ago, being
that God-sent Messiah.Both require
each other in Christian faith.Rabbinic
Jews polemicized against the adoration of a man as son of God, and thus
rejected the Christian messiah representation.Also pagans like Celsus were upset.The Church suppressed many objections for long time.

Then the time of the Enlightenment came along.English Deism promoted a natural and
rational theology as opposed to Christian dogmatism.The supernatural Christ was at the heart of the criticism.Rational, natural thinking would only accept
a man Jesus as an outstanding prophet and ethical teacher.The Passion is seen as a rational
consequence of the conflict of his ethical teachings with the laws imposed by
the Romans, not as a supernatural plot.All miracles got explained away either as fantasy or as
misinterpretation of natural phenomena.Voltaire was one of the leading thinkers of that period, along with
Locke, d'Holbach, Bolingbroke, and others.

C.F. Dupuis, pantheist and multitalented scholar of late
18th century, studied the origin of religion in general from astral
mythology.Due to the provocative
character of his main work, the reactions were violent, and Duouis himself
destroyed most of it, his wife saved some part.Dupuis derives all experiences from the natural senses, including
religious experiences.God is seen as
the cosmos itself.Religions vested
natural observances, especially astronomical ones, in allegories and myth,
building clergy and superstition on top.

The male-female polarity plays a great role in Dupuis'
theories.The sky/heaven took the
father role, the earth a mother role.Another polarity is that of darkness and light, which naturally
translated to ethical dimensions.This
is now applied to Christianity.In
autumn, when light retires and darkness starts to prevail, the constellation of
the serpent rises with the sun.The
paradisic times of summer ends, and the hard times of winter are
approaching.In spring, the
constellation of the sheep rises with the sun.This gives the paradise fall of Genesis and the resurrection of the lamb
as the cornerstones of Christian religion, fall into sin and redemption.

Due to precision, the above astronomical context is no
longer valid.Dupuis also explained
many more Christian aspects from astral mythology.As all the biography of Jesus from the Gospels is written in the
sky, it's obsolete to even think about a historical man.All ancient testimonies are just secondary
hearsay based on Gospel legend and thus historically pointless.

C.F. Volney, slightly after Dupuis, was a politician during
the revolution and known for his journey reports.He used the two cornerstones of Dupuis' astral mythical
interpretation of Christianity, and also noted that the ethics of Christianity
is nowhere near consequent, and absolutely not original.Religion and its accompanying superstition
is the root of the decay of society and civilisation.The Christian God is hypocritical and violates boldly his own
ethical requirements.

H.S. Reimarus, scholar of oriental philology, in early 18th
century started an argumentation involving in the aftermath the denial of the
historicity.It was known to the public
only posthumously.Both the Old
Testament and New Testament are denied scriptural value.Cheating and trickery are all behind
scripture.

At an early stage, Reimarus accused Jesus to have
fraudulently started a plot to make him known as the Messiah in future times,
using his disciples as agents of the plot, later the disciples themselves
became originators of the Messiah-plot.The popular superstitions have been used to feign miracles.The disciple stole Jesus' corpse and spread
the lie about a risen Lord.If Jesus
himself, he was, though not bad as ethical teacher, a political criminal and
rightfully crucified by Roman authorities for fraudulent political conspiracy.

Theologian K.F. Bahrdt built on Reimarus and wrote a
fantastic romance based on above conspiracy theory.

Venturini, in the same period, saw Jesus in the context of
an Essene conspiracy, again with cheating and abuse of superstition.The resurrection is seen as reanimation
(resuscitation) from a feigned death.Many Essene conspiracy theories are derived from this point.

Rational theologians at that time concentrated on pointing
out the ethical standards of Jesus and his teachings, rationalizing all
miraculous elements to avoid the ridicule of enlightened minds.H.E.G. Paulus recognized the miraculous
birth, but thought of rational explanation of all other so-called miracles.

Dishonesty ruled among many pseudorational theologians, like
F. Schleiermacher and K.A. Hase.

Supernaturalism still flourished, and when several Gospels
described the same even in contradictory details, the event was explained as
two different events, which would consequently have implied several births,
several executions, several ascensions of the same Jesus.Now consequence [consistency] was not a
virtue among historicizing theologians.

Philosophical considerations did not help theology past the
sticking point described above until the aftermath of Hegel's philosophy, with
D.F. Strauss being the first towering point.Due to public pressure, Strauss had to abjure from part of his more
consequent theories later on.

Contradictions and Thaumaturgy led Strauss to deny the
historical value of the Gospels, those being pure fiction.They are but poetic dressing for religious
thoughts in order to prove the Messianiscity of Jesus, as naturally emerged in
early Christian communuities.

Stories of the Tanakh have unintentionally carried over to
Jesus.Nothing at all may be inferred
about Jesus from the Gospels. Strauss was thus about the first who consequently
dared to carry over mythical explanations to the New Testament, as others did
earlier with the Old Testament.

John's Gospel was first dismissed, as it is chock full of
Gnostic dogmatics.Also the synoptics
are gradually dismantled of their historical value.While Jesus remains the historical implementation of an idea of
God, this implementation is imperfect, as anything in history.By faith in Jesus humanity justifies itself
before God.Jesus is the first man to
realize in himself the idea of Humanity.

In the aftermath of the now moderated Strauss,
liberal-critical Christology established itself in Protestant Germany, whose
leading theologian became D. Schenkel.Jesus was seen as the Jewish nice guy whose perfect moral standards and
teachings are to be followed.The
consensus was that only a very critical research of the Gospels, after banning
anything supernatural, would lead to an acceptable result.

John's gospel was held in lowest esteem for this purpose,
while Mark's gospel was preferred.John's could not be discarded, as the charismatic force of Jesus is not
expressed sufficiently in the synoptics.This revised Jesus was needed for reconciling the Church with the
educated citizens, a link broken thoroughly in enlightenment times.Speculative philosophy, metaphysics, and
faith in God have all been thrown overboard in the bloated minds of educated
bourgeois.A romantic Jesus biography
by E. Renan in 1864 was quite helpful for this purpose.

Also Strauss tried something similar, using for example the
works of F.C. Baur from Tuebingen, but the attempt of this serious scholar was
too weak to accomplish such a vulgarizing task.More serious theologians, especially Catholics, were appalled by
Renan's romance, especially how it abused John's Gospel in a vulgarized
style.Others followed this trend in
the following decades.

Christianity ceased thusly to be a religion and degenerated
into a profane moral system, for the sake of conquering the educated bourgeois
circles.This was pointed out
especially, besides by D.Strauss, in the succeeding comments of Eduard von
Hartmann.But this serious philosopher
harvested nothing but sarcasm and deprecation from the (mis)educated
"liberal" modern minds, especially when he outlined how a serious
religion would have to look like.

Then along came Bruno Bauer, former right-wing
Hegelian.He dismantled first John's
gospel, unveiling it as sophistry in philonic slant, representing a step in the
evolution of the self-esteem of early Christian community, but not a history of
Jesus.The synoptics are scanned, and
all that can be retained about Jesus is someone who was posthumously forged
into a wannabe-messiah by a community.Later Bauer gave up even this, and also the synoptics are seen as
sophistry, not as blatant as John's, but sophistry nonetheless.

This judgment is readily extended to all kind of
religion.It's nothing but a
representation of a step in the evolution of human self-esteem.Feuerbach came to similar results about
religion.Christ is seen as the
self-alienated, ascended human self that obliterated the hegemony of Rome.Bauer's rigorism and sarcasm brought him a
lot of professional trouble.Later
Bauer began dismantling Acts, and then Paul.All are sophistries, collected by contradictory wings of the Christian
community, and witnessing a forceful attempt to tie the wings together.

Christianity is the product of the intimidated class of
Romans who needed a straw of hope and faith in their struggle against the
egoism of Caesars.It's absurd to
suppose it to be originating from Hierosolyma.The origin of the Gospel literature is then reexamined.Originally, it's just a demonstration of the
new principle of freedom, in rebellion against the law-dominated world,
represented by Judaism.The Gospels
demonstrate various steps in the evolution of this esteem.

The main factor of influence was of the Roman empire, whose
oppression forced the community to look for hope in a kingdom of heavens and
exterminating the kingdom of Rome to make it possible.After 1870 this was formulated in various
books about Jesus and the Caesars.

Christianity of course did not originate in Palestine, but
in Rome and Alexandria.Philo
Alexandrinus elucidated Judaist religion in the light of Roman and Hellenic
thinking.Herecleitos' logos and
Plato's anima mundi were identified and represented as the Reason of the Jewish
God, mediating between God and man, that is, idea and reality.L.A. Seneca elaborated the Godman, the ideal
aim for the human being, and showed, how that one, living in utter humility,
instills mankind with new hopes and faith.

Seneca's Stoic ideals had such an influence on the
Paulinics, that Church tradition claimed Paul to be Seneca's teacher.Other especially Stoic thinkers (Epictetus?)
of imperial Rome had similar impact on the New Testament literature.Also some of the emperors were of positive
influence, like Augustus, Tiberius, and Mark Aurel.In the negative sense, it's of course the imperial pressure of
the Caesars who forced Christianity into the faith in a spiritual empire.

Tacitus and Suetonius may claim Christianity to be of Palestine
origin, but their reports are plain hearsay, and ridiculously confused, so no
serious historiography may be based on those.Also Romans were well-known for their fabulous fantasy, which includes
those historiographers.Plinius-Traian's correspondence is readily seen as interpolated and
utterly worthless.

The proto-gospel must have been of Italic origin, during
Hadrian's reign.Mark's gospel is thus
readily identified as thoroughly pagan.Absolutely no such thing as a historical Jesus of Galilee is needed to
explain the genesis of Mark's gospel.

Bauer also discovered many minor absurdities and corruptions
that occurred in traditional exegesis.

Of course the contemporary reaction against Bauer was one of
ridicule and deprecation, as Bauer exaggerated occasionally with his
speculations, But Bauer's work was a giant step into the right direction,
especially pointing out the towering roles of Philo and Seneca.

While silenced-to-death in Germany, B. Bauer's work found
its continuation among Dutch scholars, the so-called Dutch radical school,
though not all are depending on Bauer.Hoekstra disproved in 1871 any worth of Mark's gospel for a biography of
Jesus.The synoptics are just symbolic
poetry.A milestone was set by A.
Pierson in 1878, who proved that the mountain sermon is a post-70 product, a
collection of aphorisms of Jewish wisdom pushed into the mouth of the semi-god
Jesus.Extrachristian witnesses are
utterly worthless, especially Tacitus.

Galatians, one of the 4 letters by "Paul" judged
as doubtlessly authentic by the Tuebingen school of F.C. Baur, is clearly shown
as a late forgery.The criticism
concerning the authenticity of Paul's epistles was extended essentially by A.D.
Loman, who proved that all (!) New Testament texts are second-century
constructs.They are contradictory and
unreliable, and thus utterly worthless for historical statements about certain
early first century persons.

There may have been some "Jesus", but its role is
left completely in the dark and can't be reconstructed by scripture or any
other extant ancient testimony.The
Jesus of scripture is an ideal person, symbolizing the essence of the people of
Israel that sacrificed itself in the wars against the Romans, and was revived
spiritually in the shape of the Christian community.

The whole Gospel story is thus a purely symbolic one.Needless to say, this thesis was provocative
and upset many.The Quaestiones
Paulinae, dealing with the falsely so-called "epistles" of Paul,
appeared around 1885.Christianity is
to be explained as a conjunction of Jewish and Roman-Hellenic thinking.All the Pseudopaulinics, along with Luke's,
are to be explained as of Gnostic origin, domesticated after tormenting
struggles.They aren't even epistles,
but domesticated gnostic treatises.

Pierson worked together with S.A. Naber on an extension of
this topic, disseminating the falsely so-called Paulinics, detecting immanent
incoherencies of the worst sort, incomprehensible for the minds of those to
whom the letters pretend to have been addressed.Greek myths have been mixed with Isaiah.Naber did not give up a historical core of
the Paul of the Acts of the Apostles.R. Steck from Switzerland, a former authenticist, supported Naber and
Pierson.Also W. van Manen was originally
anti-radical, but also not content with the liberal-critical Christology
mentioned previously.He suffered a lot
when having to discover that the authenticity of "Paul's letters" may
not be maintained.The author of the
letters is using the authority of the historical Paul in order to enforce
dogmatics.

G.I.P. Bolland from Lijden continued Bauer's concepts about
Philo, the Caesars, and their influence on Christianity.Bolland restored Matthean priority.Matthew's gospel is explained as a judeochristianisation
of a Gnostic Gospel, like that of the Egyptians, as used by the Nasseni in
Hippolyos' report.Central is the
parabolic teaching of the man that went to sow seeds on various types of
ground, with varying results.The seed
is readily identified with the Stoic Logos.In Alexandria, such a doctrine must have existed already in the school
of Philo, boldly before any Christianity.

The Gospel according to the Egyptians arrived at Rome and
was Judaized by (Pseudo-)Matthew.(I
agree with the origin from some Gnostic gospel, the parables, and the Philonic
Logos, but suppose intermediate steps, involving additional Syriac sources, as
opposed to a simple-and-straight procedure of Matthew's gospel being the
Judaization of Egyptians'. -ks)

Christ is interpreted as the symbolic representation of the
celestial divine community that overcomes the earthly hegemony of the Caesars
and the pagan deities.Bolland
confirmed the origin of Christianity in a pre-Christian Jewish Gnosticism,
assuming it, like M. Friedlander, in the Alexandrian hyper-Hellenized
diaspora.The original Jerusalem mother
community is of course mere fiction.

Christ is the representation of true Reason and
doctrine.It's the good (Chrestos) god,
like the Serapis of Egypt, secondarily shaped into the Jewish messiah.The New Testament authors are not Jews, but
rather Hellenistic, from Alexandria and Rome.Along with previously van Loon, Bolland assumes that the Jesus
superceded the Mosaic cult, like Yeshuah superceded Moses as leader of the people
of Israel, as Moses failed to complete the task to guide the people into the
promised land, whereas Yeshuah did.

Bolland also had precise concepts about what the Hellenized
Jewish theosophy in the succession of Philo looked like, and how Christianity
developed straight from it.The
pseudoepigraphic Odes of Solomon have been exploited for this by Bolland.Bolland's writings are perhaps too much in
Hegelian spirit than might be beneficial for objective historical scholarship,
but Bolland was doubtlessly extremely literate in religious history.The last member of the Dutch radical school
is G.A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, duly dealt with in many other postings
in the JesusMysteries discussion group.(Note that a lot of van Eysinga's publications are from after 1926.)

In 1887, Edwin Johnson published in London anonymously the
book "Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins" (http://www.radikalkritik.de/AntiquaMater1.pdf),
which continues in the footsteps of B. Bauer, Naber, and Pierson.It examines the testimonies about early
Christianity from outside scripture.

It is proved that there's absolutely no reliable witness
whatsoever on the life of Jesus or the apostles.Tacitus, if authentic at all, which may be seriously doubted, may
easily refer to messianic Jews at Nero's Rome, conflated with Christians under
Trajan's time.Justin Martyr, around
150, only has rudimentary knowledge about Jesus and the Apostles, he has no
whatsoever knowledge about scripture besides the Tanakh.The Gospels and epistles are nowhere in
sight.

Christianity evolved from a quietist Jewish Diaspora
movement named provisionally Hagioi.They represented a liberal, spiritualized view of the Torah, with deeper
moral attachment, but relaxed exterior signs of Judaism, while still sticking
to the selected role of the people of Israel.Philo's allegoric teaching about one or more mediators between the
transcendent God and the material world is adapted.Gnosticism, a pre-Christian religious movement, is identified as
the origin of Christianity as a religion apart from Judaism and decadent forms
of pagan cults.

The originator of Gnosticism may be Simon Magos of Samaria,
who emerged under the rule of Claudius and attracted many followers with
exorcisms, magic, prophesies, and mystic, salvific ceremonies.This gave rise to Christianity and a doctrine
about heaven, earth, and hell, only to be understood pneumatically.A redeemer is the epiphany of the good
(Chrestos) God to spread the doctrine and teach the mysteries.

Thus they have been called Chrestoi, which got corrupted
into Chrestiani, then Christiani, by the Romans.They invented the symbolic story about the Christ's death under
Pilatus.They pirated the myth of Dionysos
Eleutherios, a self-sacrificing Godman for the salvific sake of
humanity.Paul of the letters is to be
seen barely as a historical person, but rather as a possibly idealized
Marcionite.Marcion is the reformer of
Gnostic doctrine which was invented by Simon Magos.

The letter of Galatians is the Marcionite refutation of the
antimarcionite Acts of the Apostles.The twelve apostles are an utterly figmentary legend.Churchianist Christianity is a product of
the Antoninian period.

In any case it's an utterly absurd nonsense to try to
understand the Gospels as source for historic research.

Next we come to J.M. Robertson, a scholar of politics,
sociology, and economics.Around 1900
he set out to study the evolution of religions, especially the Christian one, under
sociological aspects.

He supposes a general law behind the evolution of
religion.Only the environment and
social circumstances would make them appear different.New deities appear and push away the old
ones, being usually called sons of the older deities.This is seen in the case of the Israelite religion.In spite of the official monotheism
practiced by its priests, the prior polytheism has never completely died out.

Occasionally the suppressed deities emerged, especially
under the influence of the Hellenic and Roman culture.One of those gods was Joshua, honored as the
successor of Moses.Joshua was a prior
Ephraimite deity, worshipped in the shape of a lamb.Passover and circumcision were due to that god.A common meal with 12 participants was part
of that cult.

Even more originally, the old Joshua was a vegetation deity,
also named Nezer (twig).The sect of
the Nazoreans is named after that Nezer.It dies each fall and resurrects each spring.An old Persian tradition called him son of Mirijam.Also the ancient tradition of the Natsorites
is related.In any case it has nothing
at all to do with that town of Nazareth, as in that case he'd be called
Nazorethean or similar.Also Paul only
knows a shadowy figment of this Jesus.

Robertson admits the possibility of the influence of
Yeashuah ben Pandira, a heterodox Jewish preacher from the times of Alex
Iannaios, possible founder of the Essene sect, was somehow involved.But the Gospel Jesus as such has to be
discarded as myth, where in Robertson's sense, unlike in mine, myth is to be
understood in the naturalistic, not the metaphysical meaning.

The Gospels are more or less the extension of a sorts of
pious cultic mystery play, which was popular in the Hellenized world.For example Judah Iscariot may have played
the role of the Jewish folk in such a mystery drama.In the eyes of the spectator, and succeeding tales, Judah became
the big traitor.

The mass of the existing passion plays, performed under the
auspices of the local churches, prove how popular the dramatic representation
of faith has been and that it has major influence on the popular understanding
of religion.

Robertson shows several examples of how the celebration of
such a vegetational theory is connected with spring sacrifices.Paul himself may have been actor in one of
the performances of such a mystery game, judging according to his claims of
bearing the stigmata of the crucified.

As all the characterizing traits of the biographies of Jesus
correspond to mythological elements, it's absolutely obsolete to suppose an
historical Jesus.The so-called
teachings of Jesus are a mixture of Jewish and pagan doctrines.This is also valid for the mountain sermon,
a patchwork of Jewish aphorisms that were stuffed into Jesus' mouth.

The Gospels demonstrate various layers of generation.Roberts identifies the process of the
formation of Christian myths with Gnosticism.In this sense, the Gospels are Gnostic writings.It doesn't matter how old they are, they are
in any case a mixture of event-driven and doctrine-driven myths.After their deconstruction the only thing
that remains is Paulinic propaganda plus a shadowy crucified Messiah.

A similar method has been used by T. Whittacker, who
attempted a synthesis of van Manen's with Robertson's theory.

The liberal-critical Christology of the Protestant church in
Germany around 1870 opened the way for secular life-of-Jesus research, where no
longer Christian questions, but rather of the type: What was Jesus' attitude
towards his Jewish environment?Towards
messianism, apocalypse, and eschatology?Did he even think of being the messiah?Many treatises circled around those topics.

The more one examined the environment in which Jesus
appeared to have lived, the stranger it became to modern thinking.Instead of presenting Jesus more clearly to
modern minds, he actually disappeared more and more.Jesus was compared to rabbinic teachers of the Talmud and to
heathen philosophers, with the disappointing certainty turning out that
everything Jesus thought, said, or did, was already covered earlier in a
similar manner, and the supremacy of Christianity, of which Protestant theology
was so confidently proud, was blown into smithereens.

Finally, a man with fixed apocalyptic messianic ideas as
Jesus was claimed to have must have been declared paranoid.Thus what sense would this research still
have? Protestant theologians escaped into more and more mindless sophistry.Hollow pathos spoke through the tongues of
the theologians.Harnack was the top of
the glacier.

Eduard von Hartmann paranetically condemned the
liberal-critical theology as destructive.Theology must develop forward, like all acquaintances of culture, and
not hurry back to the root.The New
Testament is hopelessly outdated, Christianity needs to improve developed
church doctrine by opening new alternatives adapted for the challenges of
modern civilization.Only the Christ
idea, which must be improved and updated, is of essential use for Christianity,
not the real or supposed origins in Palestine 2000 years ago.Some chimed in, but essentially Eduard von
Hartmann's words like silent raindrops fell.

The trend was absolutely hostile to metaphysical
considerations.The ignoble masses were
too stupid to understand it.Thus the
liberals blew any critics to smithereens.

It was conceded that even Mark's gospel is no longer a
historical account, but dogmatic literature.But the rising of the so-called two-source theory raised the hopes that
the new hypothetical source, Q, would lead to authentic words of Jesus, and
also in conjectured oral traditions, the catchall of lazy historizers.One didn't claim anymore to know anything
specific about the historical Jesus besides having lived.With pseudoscience and bloated sophistry
liberal theology won over all serious research and got excessively popularized.

A. Kalthoff countered the liberal-critical Christology
thoroughly around 1900.He's been a
part of that movement himself, but was finally dissatisfied with its methods
and results, as it drove especially Protestant theology into a dead end.If taken seriously, it revealed an average
nice Jewish guy of 1900 years ago; how would he have been the reason for a new
religion? And it took theology almost 2 millennia to realize this, so there
were many centuries wasted for virtually nothing.And if it was really a messianic prophet, it must have been a
psychopath, and the church he founded was the catholic one.

No one yet dared to explain Christianity in a dialectically
materialistic manner.This was applied
to Judaism, but Christianity was still assumed as the one and only big
exception, founded by a Great personality.Kalthoff decided to sweep away this arrogant attitude.Christianity must be explainable from the
economical, political, and social circumstances of the region and time period
where it started.The attempt to delete
away all the supernatural elements led to a Jesus without anything at all that
justified seeing him as the beginning of a new religion; whether one starts
with John's gospel or with the synoptics didn't even matter.

According to liberal-critical theology, the resurrection
tale would be the result of pathetic messianic enthusiasm, and with this main
Gospel event being of psychotic origin, consequently Christianity would be
nothing but a psychosis.Kalthoff also
figured that the New Testament is based on the early church, not the other way
round, which would directly undermine the core preassumptions of Protestant
theology.

The oldest Christian writings see Christ essentially as the
transcendental principle of the community.The Gospels had been written not to tell about the life of any Jesus
whatsoever, but to represent the Christ according to the community's
dogmatics.The mood of the first
Christians was doubtlessly an apocalyptic one, with expectation of the closing
end of the world, and hence the coming of something new.The social reform of the apocalyptic Old
Testament prophets has to be seen as central moment in the early Christian
communities.

Kalthoff also discussed the possibility of Pilatus being a
code for Plinius, the antichristian procurator of early second century.The figure of Peter as head of the Roman
community forcefully suggests that the placement of the events was moved from
somewhere else to Palestine.Many
social circumstances described in the Gospels fit much better to Italy than to
Palestine.After the suppression of
Spartacus' slave rebellion, the social reformer forces were oppressed more and
more, but could not be eliminated completely.This leads to a fertile ground for Jewish apocalyptic concepts of an end
of the world as it is, and expectations for a better one.Christianity is the result of the concept of
the power struggle from above versus below, a thoroughly socialist movement.

After giving many more details, Drews agrees with Kalthoff
in his refutation of the liberal-critical school, but refutes many weak spots
of his hypotheses.Plinius is surely a
late forgery.The proscription under Trajan,
just like that under Nero, is just pious martyr-history.Then slavery is justified in the New
Testament, and was only frowned upon modern times.

The aims are spiritual, not material, even if worldly
possessions are seen as corruption.Christian communism, where it appeared, has never been the result
ofeconomical, but of religious
consideration.But after forgotten
Bauer, it was Kalthoff who had reanimated criticism against the Historicity of
Jesus in Germany, and he must be honored for that.

Around 1900, P. Jensen was a scholar of Mesopotamian history
and Semitic languages.He worked a lot
on the Sumerian Gilgamesh tales and discovered its traces to be found in all
later myths around the Mediterranean, Mesopotamian, and even Indian world.This includes the Tanakh and thus implicitly
the Gospels.Jensen made parallel
columns of various tales and marked the correspondences.This convinced him of seeing the stories
about Moses and Isaiah as derived from Gilgamesh.But there are a lot of inversions and sophistications that make
the parallels doubtful, mildly said.

Of course also Jensen harvested sarcasm and irony.

Finally Jensen succumbed to the schizophrenia of affirming
Jesus' historicity but being unable of knowing anything about the same.Somehow, somewhere, sometime in the vicinity
of the era switch, someone's behavior and talks must have given rise to the
Gospels.

Nor only Jensen dived into early Semitic literature.Chaldean and Sumeran influences on the Old
Testament and New Testament were researched frequently around then, for example
by A. Jeremias.

Jeremias still succumbed to the orthodox position and only
admitted Chaldean origin of early Judaism, but couldn't deny that there was
some sort of impact from old Babylon in the New Testament.The Babylonian-Chaldean worldview is about
the most astralmythical and astrological worldview found in history of
cultures; the terms 'astrological' and 'Chaldean' were used synonymously by
many authors since Hellenic times.In
this sense Jeremias continued the works of Volney and Dupuis, who had been
considered only by a certain Korn until then.The Christian calendar tells the story of the astral redeemer king, the
12 apostles are akin to the zodiac, and the 4 Gospels are akin to the cardinal
points of the world.

The school of History of Religions went further, against the
protests of Jeremias.This school,
strong in the earliest 20th century, was boosted by new archeological
discoveries around the turn of the century and pointed out more and more
agreements in the various religions throughout space and time, especially
mythological parallels.More and more
traits of the Gospel stories could be identified as mythical commonplaces and
thus readily dismissed as historically irrelevant for the research of early
Christianity.Even without denying the
historicity of Jesus straightforwardly, it pushed towards the impossibility of
discovering anything about the historical Jesus in the New Testament.

It became impossible to see Christianity any longer as
something unique.O. Pfeiderer and H.
Gunkel were among the publishers of this school.Gunkel especially pointed out the role of the Mandean religion
and pre-Christian apocalyptic Judaism.The apocalypse of John is a masterpiece of the latter influence.Gunkel is particularly aware of the
possibility that talmudic Judaism suppressed more or less deliberately some
rich apocalyptic tradition, which makes research hard and leads many scholars
astray.

Death and resurrection of the savior clearly predate
Christianity; both aspects of this theme are found in syncretic Judaism.Paulinic baptism concepts are found earlier
in Hellenic mystery cults, along with the Paulinic person of Christ as
such.Those traits have posthumously
been transferred to Jesus.After
deleting anything (pseudo-)historical from Jesus, one still stuck to an utterly
unknown historical Jesus, the only thing to be known is that he was, for some
unclear reason, posthumously attributed with all the syncretic features.

K. Vollers came closer to the denial of the historicity of
Jesus.Also Vollers sees Christianity
as a synthesis of Jewish messianism and the Hellenic concept of the dying and
resurrecting Godman.Vollers pointed to
the contradictions between Paul and the Gospels, and admitted that one doesn't
necessarily need to assume an historical Jesus for explaining early
Christianity.

Some scholar pseudonymously drew the consequences and
finally admitted that the historical Jesus is nonsense, as syncretic
religiosity of the turn of the era was clearly sufficient to explain
Christianity without making a historicity assumption, so it's best not to make
one.The Gospels are symbolic fiction,
made by the church/community, and not the base on which a church was
subsequently established.

While the liberal Jesus cult flourished ferociously, W.B.
Smith published his books around 1906.Smith postulates a pre-Christian Christianity.Traces of it are to be found in the Acts of the Apostles, where
in 19:1 a few
disciples of John the Baptist are encountered in Ephesos who don't know yet
about the holy spirit.Those are seen
as pre-Christian Christians.Simon
Magus and Elymas are seen in this movement.

Cyprus must have been a centre of the cult, Jerusalem just
secondarily pretended to be the origin.'Nazorean' is derived from a term for guardian and seen as a title for a
cultic God.The usage of Jesus in magic
papyri is used to underline this.Also
Jesus is seen as Hellenization of a conflation of two different Semitic terms.

Also a Hellenic pun is involved, making Jesus appear as
healer.Also, the term 'anastase' is
seen ambiguously both as resurrection from the dead and emission as world
leader/messiah.

Romans is unknown before the middle of the second century
and has nothing to do with that Paul known from the Acts of the Apostles.Jesus thus can't be seen as a historical
person, but as a god, and the Gospels must be seen as symbolic tales.Historicists fail to prove how the pretended
unique personality of Jesus may have been at the beginning of a new religion.

The main impetus of the Jesus-cult movement that finally
started Christianity as a universal religion is the increasing protest against
polytheistic idolatry.Thus the
miraculous healings throughout the Gospels are nothing but dispelling of
idolatry, for the sake of an unadulterated monotheism.All humanized traits of Jesus are a
prevailing trend of later scripture.

At least one liberal Jesus theologian, Schmiedel, was
impressed enough by Smith to be unable to dismiss his arguments lightly.

A. Drews was disgusted by the sophistry of the
liberal-critical school around Harnack when he set out to write The Christ Myth,
which first appeared in 1909.The role
of the dying and reborn Godman/son of God in the various myths around the world
was the starting point for Drews' discoveries.After knowing about most of the above mentioned works of various people,
up to W.B. Smith, Drews was absolutely sure that the story of Jesus can't be
anything but a version of the typical Godman's epos.

Drews anticipated of course that the Harnack-mafia would do
anything to silence the book The Christ Myth, and anything in its vein, to
death.But there were some minor clubs
interested in discussion, like the Federation of Monists.

Seneca expresses the salvific needs found in Hellenized
Roman society of his time in his representation of the Great Good man, being a
moral example for anyone and guiding mankind to salvation.Emperor Augustus has been perceived as a
soteric (salvific) figure.The need of
the world is expected in the not too far future, followed by the coming of the
time of peace and freedom for the worthy ones.Demons and mean spirits are feared.All these expectations drove people into mystery sects.

The Jewish people also maintained increasing apocalyptic
expectations, with the Messiah as the central figure in the endtime battle that
is seen approaching.While Pharisees
still stick to legal scribalism, less conservative Jews like Essenes and the
Therapeutae establish their own mysteries for assuring resurrection at the end
of time.Philo performs the perfect
fusion of the Tanakh and Hellenic, prevalently Stoic philosophy.

The book The Christ Myth makes it plausible that there's
already been a deity named Jesus, identified in the Tanakh as Joshuah, who
conquered Palestine, and another one being high priest in a prophecy of some
Zachary.'Nazorean' is confirmed in its
meaning as "guardian".The
fatal passion of the righteous savior is found in Plato's works and in Jewish
wisdom poetry.

Virgin origin, persecution as a little child, and similar
details of the birth tales are also found in various pre-Christian cults.Paul, probably unauthentic, after closer
inspection reveals a divine, rather than human Jesus. A conflation of Jesus- and Adonis cult is
brought to surface.

Then the synoptic Jesus is examined, after dismissing John's
right away.The arguments of Markan
priority are utterly weak.And seeing
historicity there is only possible with wishful liberal-Protestant thinking.

Using secular witnesses for a historical Jesus is a
downright bad joke.The mythical
patterns found in Mediterranean and Iranian cults of the time are more than
sufficient to explain the falsely so-called biography of Jesus.

Christianity came forth from Gnosticism, an antisocial form
of Jewish mystery sectarianism.In the
process of domestication of the sociophobic religiosity a historical
personality of Jesus had to be elaborated, along with a society-friendly moral
system.

A minor appendix was dedicated to the Petrus-legend,
eventually available in English in 1997 as the book The Legend of Saint Peter:
A Contribution to the Mythology of Christianity.

A. Niemojewski's main book appeared in 1910.It also shows a divine Jesus preceding any
rumours about a human one.Contradictions in the Gospel tales prove that they are impossibly about
one and the same person -- especially the sayings aren't from a single person.The sayings are co-opted from Jewish common
sources and stuffed into the mouth of the alleged master Jesus.

The most important part of the Gospels, besides the logia,
are miracles.One can't neglect them as
the liberal Jesus proponents do, without destroying Christian scripture.Miracles are proofs for the divinity of
Jesus.Falsely so-called proofs about
the human Jesus, like Flavius Josephus, are easily dismissed as chatty hearsays
or interpolations.

Niemojewski continues the line of Volney and Dupuis, by
looking for parallels in astral mythology.The Tanakh and Talmud are already full of astral mythological images,
like the 12 Jewish tribes and sons of Jacob.Even more, of course, the New Testament.This is seen strongest in the Apocalypse of John.The twin myth, applied to Jesus and John, is
especially interesting for Niemojewski.The constellation of Gemini plays a central role for Niemojewski.The astral mythological elements are
strongest in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke; Mark contains them only quite
marginally.

In the end, Niemojewski's system was too confusing to get
much consideration, when compared to simpler astral mythical interpretations.

Also S. Lublinski wrote a similar book back then, showing
the backgrounds of the time that brought forth Christianity.The result was a world-saving king with
supernatural mission and human traits.Mystery cults and ancient public churches gave their visitors the
impression of an eudemonic afterlife and purgation of evil spirits and sins.

The Pharisees were astromagical fantasists for a long
time.They had just changed the
planetary deities of the Chaldeans into angels, and strengthened the moral
codes assigned to those beings, which were otherwise were no different from
their Babylonian and Canaanite forerunners.The Messiah belief was added on top of this.

Christianity is a result of Gnosticism, an extreme Jewish
mystery faith.The Essenes and
Therapeutae are seen among those extreme sects.'Nazarean' is also seen as "guardian".The fall of Zion started a deep split in
Judaism.The rebellion against Rome was
from circles of Jewish national mysticism and Gnosis.

Pharisees ever since fell away from their astromagical faith
and replaced it with pure legalism.This increased after bar Kochba's times and culminated in Talmudic
Rabbinism as known now.Astral
mysteries became deprecated, a 180-degree turn for Phariseism.The hostility between Jews and Christians
expressed in the second century and the sequel is a result of this pharisaic
self-mutilation.The dogmatic and metaphysical
intentions expressed clearly in the Gospel traditions show that the
Life-of-Jesus tales are nothing but dogmatically adapted and re-forged myth.

It is thus ridiculously naive to even try to squeeze
anything historical out of the representation of the life of Jesus as shown in
the Gospels.Christianity also can't be
seen as a social movement; its base class is a magical one, not a
socio-economical one.Lublinkski was
influenced by the great valuable work of M. Friedlaender, and both deserve a whole
lot more attention than they ever got.They most likely got the correct explanation of Christian origins.

In addition to all the above, A. Schweitzer stated in 1906
that the Jesus of liberal theology is a ridiculous figment of the
theologians.Schweitzer constructed a
Jesus of consequent eschatology instead.But this can't be seen as anything more than an attempt out of despair.The book The Christ Myth, and even more the
subsequent articles and lectures by Drews, provoked a riot among the liberal
theologians, anyway, though they should have been accustomed to that in the
meantime.

The orthodox responded with reckless stubborn
thundering.Liberals needed arguments
instead.Their chieftain Harnack
already in 1904 gave out the concepts to counter the ahistoricists like
Kalthoff, which were now applied against Drews.Harnack himself refused to participate in public dialogues,
declaring the Jesus mythers to be amateurs who didn't warrant the dignity of
his presence.

Only in 1910 Harnack asked his famous 6 antimyther-questions
in a journal in Vienna, which he thought to disprove the Jesus mythers
thoroughly.This shows that it's
useless to mention most of the objections brought forth from orthodox and
liberal theologians against the Christ Myth, they are all nothing but dogmatic
and pseudoargumentative rhetorics.Von
Soden's ridiculous polemics, using besides the Harnackian arsenal many
thoroughly obsoleted secular testimonies like Flavius Josephus', was countered
rigorously by Steudel who pointed clearly the scientific worthlessness of all
those liberal polemics.

H. Weinel's polemics were a bit less infantile than von
Soden's, but even more arrogant.Weinel
said that the life-of-Jesus-research was still in its infancy and will have to
grow first, in order to establish the ultimate picture of the historical
Jesus.The extrachristian testimonies
for Jesus are dishonestly used with even more recklessly increased sophistry.Paul spoke about sisters-in-law of Jesus, according
to that Weinel.

The thoroughly dishonest attitude of liberal Protestant
theology, who blatantly lied away all the vital problems of the Gospels,
provoked Reverend Steudel again to counterattack, also against J. Weiss,
another Harnack guilder, who presented publically the usual liberal-critical
nonsense under a pseudoscholarly cover.Steudel also addressed against a certain Choson who abused the Talmud to
support the liberal Jesus cult.

The reasons for theologians to insist on the historicity of
Jesus proved not to be historical ones, but merely social-psychological
ones.Orthodox refutations of The
Christ Myth tend to be a lot more objective and less arrogant than liberal
ones, as they did not need historicity in order to patch up their feeble faith.

The continuation of Drews' The Christ Myth, as well as
subsequent articles, refute the polemics against the first part.Thus the Harnack guild failed in their weak
attempts to silence Drews.Theologians
are shown as unworthy of being called researchers of history of religion.The secular testimonies are shown as the
worthless rubbish that they are, especially Tacitus.

The particularly ridiculous argument of many Historical
Jesus proponents that no ancient historian denies the historicity of Jesus is
also dismantled.It all shows the
reckless intellectual dishonesty of the Harnack guild.Arguments against the usage of Paul as
evidence for the Historical Jesus are strengthened.The Gospels are more rigorously shown to be of dubious origin and
tradition.The methods of liberal Jesus
culters to distill a historical core all turned out to be bogus and
dogmatically driven.

The whole consistency of the Gospels exhibits their mythical
origin.It is shown in numerous
examples that much of the Gospel tales is just a poetically mutated
Tanakh.The mountain sermon is a
patchwork from concurrent rabbinic tradition.The ethics of Jesus is also just a tainted copy.

The one and only innovative feature of Christianity is the
idea of the Godman.Post-Enlightenment
theologians are beyond the capacity of making sense out of this truly religious
concept, as their dogmatism slid away, leaving secular rationalism, far removed
from any religious worth.

The second part did not particularly impress the theologians
any more than the first part had.Klosterman, at least, had to admit that some of the most obsolete jokes
of the liberal theology, like the uninventability of the Gospel Jesus, had to
be disposed with, unless theology wants to ridicule itself.But the trend was to ignore Drews, as well
as van Eysinga.

Drews was involved too deep into the subject to stop there,
and went boldly further, exploring how Christianity could become a world
religion without a historical founder or core group described in
scripture.The positive attempts like
astral mythology, already outlined by many scholars earlier, were continued in
Drews' works and fused to a coherent conceptual construct.During the war, Schweitzer published more
essays in a weak attempt to justify theology, which strengthened Drews'
attitude and endeavor.

In 1921, Drews showed how Mark's gospel disproves the
historicity of Jesus.The Gospel is
nothing but a poetic retelling of the astral mythical journey of the sun god,
dressed in Tanakh pictures.The whole
character of Jesus is patched together from the prophets and wisdom literature.The order of the tales follows almost strictly
the astral mythical cycle.Mark's
gospel is of astral magical, Gnostic origin from the middle of the second
century.Thus the historicity of Jesus
is completely unfounded.

Theological critics ridiculously believed that astral
magical arguments could be pushed away lightly.Of course they were outrageously ignorant about the subject in
the first place.Drews published an
introduction to astral mythology in the cultures of the Mediterranean and
Iranian region up to imperial times, in order to decrease the above
ignorance.But theologians continued to
indulge in their self-induced ignorance.

In 1924 Drews finally published the book that explained
Christianity from Gnosticism, refuting the work of a certain E. Meyer.Gnosticism is undeniably pre-Christian, with
both Jewish and gentile roots.The
wisdom of Sholomo already contained Gnostic elements and prototypes for the
Jesus of the Gospels.

A secret inner connection with the apocalyptically expected
savior is deemed a salvific necessity.God stops being the Lord of righteous deed and becomes the Good
One.The faithful will get their
salvific shares without the prerequisite of righteous deeds.This is strengthened by conflation with the
pagan image of the suffering, dying, and resurrecting halfgodlings of the
mysteries.

Many witnesses of a pre-Christian Christianity are contained
in early Christian writings, plus pre-Christian writings like the Odes of
Sholomo.A clear pre-Christian
Gnosticism can be distilled from the epistles of Paul.Paul is recklessly misunderstood by those
who try to read anything Historical Jesus-ish into it.The conversion of Paul in the Acts of the
Apostles is a mere forgery from various Tanakh passages.

The epistles of Paul might not have any connection with the
Acts of the Apostles; the backgrounds don't match at all.They are from Christian mystics of the
middle of the second century.Paul is
thus the strongest witness against the Historical Jesus hypothesis.

The Gospels exhibit a historization of an originally
mythical Jesus, performed for demagogical and dogmatic reasons.John's Gnostic origin is more evident than
that of the synoptics.Its acceptance
proves that even the Church wasn't concerned with historical facts at all.

In 1924 H. Raschke published his great book about Mark's
gospel.Raschke emphasized the
non-existence of the modern historical consciousness in ancient times.Rather, everything was understood magically
and speculatively.

The Gospels are written in the ancient consciousness.Any rationalization of the Gospel tales is
thus worthless.Raschke notes that
Aramaic was the popular language of most eastern Mediterranean peoples, and
tales in the Aramaic language prevailed.Aramaic language, due to the lack of fixed vowels, is rife with puns and
ambiguities.

This is already evident in the Tanakh.For example:

·Israelites could not drink the water in a town named
Mara (bitter waters).

·Mirjam became a leper in the town of Hazaroth
(leprose).

The same happens in the gospels, especially Mark's:

·Judah Ischarioth <<Isachar (hireling)

·Multiplication of food in Beth Saida (camp of feeding)

·Martha does the dirty work in Bethany (camp of the
miserable)

·The daughter of Iairus (awaken) wakes up from the dead.

·Divorce is discussed in the land of the Geraseni
(<< gerusin, divorce)

These puns allow a very detailed examination of Mark's
tales.The Marcionites are seen as the
original community behind Mark's gospel.Jesus advices his disciples to follow a man carrying a clay jar (mrkws
>> Mark) with water.The Greek
term for clay jar is keramion, which alludes to Marcion.

The hidden docetic background of Mark's gospel has been
revealed already earlier by other scholars.

Thus doubtlessly the Christian god-son is a construct loaned
from Gnostic circles and turned into a flesh-and-bone-construct due to the
vulgarization of the religion.

·The Christ of the Gospels is a historified Christ of
Paul's epistles.

·The Christ of Paul's is a catholically tuned Gnostic
Christ.

·The Gnostic Christ is, in turn, just a metaphysical
force.

Only the modern incapacity for metaphysical thinking makes
people claim the historicity of Jesus.

Needless to say, theologians in their ignorance and dogmatic
bias put Raschke's work to ridicule.Sociopsychological reasons, for sustenance of social and political
power, require the belief in the historicity of Jesus, so it is established
against any scientific reason, no matter how irrational such belief is.

G.T. Sadler is another scholar of that period deriving early
Christianity from the Gnosticism of hyper-Hellenized Alexandrine Jews, but
unlike other scholars, he held that Jerusalem stood at the beginning, as it
attracted diaspora Jews from Alexandria.Jesus is the syncretic result of Plato's usage of the cross, the Iranian
fall into matter, the Jewish Messiah as the Lord of righteousness, the
mysteries of a dying and reborn god, and the Book of Henoch/Enoch.

The Gospel according to Mark is seen as an initiation tale
into Christianity.The biography is
again seen as pieced together from the Tanakh, the proto-Talmud, Gnostic tales,
and mystery elements.Matthew's and Luke's
gospels add a lot more art to it, which just appears to sound like history; for
example, birth tales and genealogy.Paul teaches the representation of the spirit of agape.

In Italy, E. Bossi, also known as Milesbo, concluded the
falseness of the historical Jesus hypothesis from the dubiousness of all those
so-called extrachristian witnesses, the dogmatic style of which cannot possibly
be the result of a single personality, and the convergence of the personality
with portrayals taken from the Tanakh and from mystery cults, especially
Serapis, which was analyzed previously by Ganeval.

Christian ethics is also a patchwork from former ethical
systems.Philo and Seneca are
central.Christianity is thus a
multicultural product.The Christian
church predates the Gospels and is a mixture of Judaistic, Hellenic, and Roman
forms of social gathering.Christianity
spread due to popular irrationality.

Now we come to Moutier-Rousset who deconstructed the Gospels
in a book about the existence of Jesus around 1922.First the general incredibility of the Gospels is
demonstrated.Homer's Odusseus, or
Athene or Ares, or Rabelais' Gargantuan are more credible personalities than
the Gospel Jesus.And the witnesses
from outside the Gospels are a joke.The Gospels are invented to conform with messianic Tanakh images; for
historical purposes they are utterly worthless.

Already St. Augustine said that only the authority of the
church forced him to give any credibility to the Gospels.Then St. Augustine derives the authority of
the church from the Gospels, a circular joke.Besides the people, also the geography of Galilee and Judea is oddly
misportrayed in the Gospels.Coins,
measures, and weights from somewhere else in the Roman empire were used as if
they were common among Aramaic-speaking Palestinian peasants.

Similarly P.L. Couchoud judged against the historicity of
Jesus, in his book about Jesus mysteries.There's no such thing as historical witnesses for Jesus, including
Christian and exterior sources.Couchoud assigns a historical core to the first part of Mark's gospel,
but it refers rather to Peter than to Jesus.Peter's story in the Apostolic Acts is too similar to Jesus' in the
Gospels for believing in an incident.The death of Stephen from the Acts of the Apostles was the main source
of the second part of Mark's gospel, especially the Passion narrative.

Unfortunately Couchoud didn't perceive the worthlessness of
the Acts of the Apostles for historical purposes.But Couchoud correctly considered the Gospel as a sort of Jewish
midrash explaining the parable about the sacrificing god.Couchoud accepted most of Paul's letters as
authentic.(Couchoud's acceptance
changed after Drews' article; Couchoud's well-known work about the first
edition of Paul's epistles postdates Drews' essay.)

Jesus in the Paulinics appears as identifiable with Yahveh
in some modalist sense.This makes a
human Jesus impossible, as the Jewish folk was unique in rejectingdeification of men.The existence of Christianity thus outright
excludes the historicity of Jesus.Thus
Jesus is a humanified God, not a deified man.

The Gospels are to be understood in the light of Paul's
theology.Paul's image of Jesus is a
mystic-gnostic one, distilled from the Tanakh.The epistle of Clement, the Didache, and the Shepherd of Hermas
blow the same trumpet.The faith in a
vital Jesus begot the faith in a Jesus who had lived.Marcion correctly found an exclusively spiritual Jesus.The antimarcionite polemicists obscured the
Christian origins into oblivion.It's
their fault that Christianity came to appear as the old rubbish of the
deification of a man.

The last one to be dealt with is G. Brandes, author of the
Jesus Saga in 1925.Brandes knew in
advance that he would hurt and upset many people with the ahistoricity claims,
like the first person who denied the historicity of hero William Tell to the
people of Switzerland.

The apocalypse of John is here seen as the earliest part of
the New Testament.The Gospels postdate
also Paul's epistles.The ahistoric
order the church put them in caused an insane damage.

The passion narrative is undeniably cobbled together from
tiny Tanakh pieces.There's absolutely
no reason for a historical background.There are no pagan witnesses for Jesus.Tacitus' passage is a fake.Paul's Jesus is a celestial one.

Christianity presents a fusion of various prophesized Tanakh
figures and Jahveh himself, to a God that died and resurrected, for a new
revelation.The whole Gospel is a
sewage of Tanakh prophesies.The
suffering, dying, and reborn gods of the ancient mysteries have been used as
examples.Lots of astrology and
allegory prevail in the New Testament.

The Judah-Ischarioth story is mere allegory.Only the insanity of the mindless masses
allowed it to have been believed in the first place.The resulting Jesus figure is not monolithic, but fully contradictory
and dissimilar.The Roman-Greek ethics
is greatly superior to that of the New Testament.The struggle with the Pharisees is completely unfounded.

If Jesus is apparently embarrassed in the Gospels, this is
just a shock device, such as if someone would write about young Beethoven
failing in a contest against an experienced peasant violinist.Already Kierkegaard figured that it's absurd
to look for a historically verifiable biography of Jesus in the Gospels.Divine beings are not bothered at all that
they owe their only life to human fantasy.

In the final conclusions, Drews describes the social
consequences of a denial of historicity, and explains why so many theologians
and secular researchers stick to historicity, though the ahistoricity of Jesus
is scientifically as sure as that of Romulus and Remus, or the seven legendary
kings of Rome.The consequences are
generally underestimated.

It is quite understandable that the denial party is unique
only in that point, and otherwise offers a variety of diverging
explanations.The church has done
everything for 2000 years to obscure and hide away the origins of Christianity,
so that there's no way to get any further without speculative hypotheses.

It is obvious that no serious researcher could claim the
historicity of Jesus, unless it were the savior of the dominating religion of
the prevailing culture.So there's
nothing but Christian prejudice which keeps even secular researchers from
admitting non-historicity, except of course the small minority of those who do.

Fears of the sociopsychological consequences are too deeply
engrained.Both Catholic and Protestant
churches would invalidate themselves by denying the historicity of Jesus.This excuses theologians who use a bunch of
pseudoscientific arguments for apologetic purposes.The Catholic church would lose its apostolic authority, assigned
from Jesus unto Peter.

Protestants would have set their salvific hopes on a book of
fairy tales and oriental myths.The
problem has to be silenced away.The
established press always sides with the churches as carriers of the society in
which they live so comfortably.

Thus there is no hope for the denial of historicity to find
a general public acceptance for a long time, as it would violate the interests
of the supporting columns of the established society.But it can't be oppressed and silenced completely either.Thus the denial of historicity of Jesus will
continue a shadowy existence for a long time and remerge from the shadows on
occasions.Only a complete change of
the sociopsychological constitution may someday permit the truth to be accepted
broadly.